Monthly Archives: November 2007

our built environments

Europeans and Americans tend to agree about at least one point: the built environment of the US is much newer and more homogeneous than that of Europe. Europeans, we assume, live in towns that date back to Roman times and have developed in their own, richly idiosyncratic ways for millennia. Meanwhile, we Americans live in suburbs that were designed by developers since the Kennedy Administration. That’s why we get out our cameras and guidebooks and head across the ocean for history.

There is some truth to this, but it can be exaggerated. As tourists, we get a biased sample of European communities because we choose to visit the oldest and best preserved ones. And Europeans get a somewhat biased picture of the US from TV. Most of the populous European cities and metropolitan areas are basically outgrowths of the industrial revolution. They expanded dramatically between 1830 and 1914. Then most of them were badly damaged by wars or social upheavals in the twentieth century and heavily rebuilt. Meanwhile, the great Eastern and Midwestern cities of the United States date back to the 1800s and often developed rather conservatively since World War One.

For example, Philadelphia was the second largest city in the British Empire at the time of Independence. That means that only London had more houses in Ben Franklin’s day. In both London and Philadelphia, many of the buildings that stood in 1776 were subsequently knocked down by developers, fire, or–in the case of London–by German bombs and missiles. I suppose London still has more buildings left over from the 18th century, and it has a few prominent relics from the middle ages and renaissance. But 281,000 extant structures in the Philadelphia metropolitan area were built before 1919 (pdf, p.15). This partly explains why Philadelphia–like Chicago, Charleston, and Cleveland–has a highly distinctive culture.

the Swift Boat analogy

There’s a powerful storyline beneath the Democratic primary race that goes like this:

1. John Kerry lost the 2004 election because of the Swift Boat Vets attacks, which epitomized a particularly Republican form of nasty politics that is relatively new to politics.

2. Therefore, Democrats should nominate whoever can best handle the swift boat attacks of 2007.

3. And probably, that is the candidate who has the most experience with taking personal hits and dishing them out in return. Thus, for instance Mathew Yglesias on Obama:

There’s perhaps no holder of comparable office who’s had less experience tangling with the Republican Party [emphasis is Yglesias’] than Barak [sic] Obama. This worries me. Now, on the other hand, it’s true that he’s a very appealing person in any number of other ways. What I’d like him to see is to find some way to get himself down in the muck–put himself in a position where he’s leading some kind of fight and the GOP feels compelled to try to take him down a notch or two.

I’m not expressing a preference for any presidential candidate, but I think the narrative summarized above is all wrong.

1. John Kerry was extremely, almost uniquely, vulnerable to a Swift Boat-style attack because he had no positive vision. He did not explain what he would do about Iraq. He had a health care plan, but he never talked about it. His whole rationale was that he had fought in a war and George Bush had not. He might as well have announced: Let’s debate my Vietnam War record and you can vote for G.W. Bush unless you decide that I was a moral and military hero whereas he was a shirker. In reality, anyone’s war service will involve elements of ambiguity and complexity. Kerry was simply asking for those elements in his own story to be broadcast.

2. Bitter personal attacks, while they have been conducted effectively by modern Republicans such as Karl Rove, are by no means a GOP monopoly, nor an innovation. Yet strong candidates have often won elections without counter-punching. When an attack comes, it’s by no means obvious that the best response is to respond in kind (or to respond at all). I thought that Kerry needed to articulate a reason for electing him. Failing that, he at least needed to reply to the Swift Boat Attack with humor (a powerful political asset) or with dignified personal reflection.

Thus the question for Democratic voters this time is not: Who can dish it out? It’s: Who has something else (other than personal flaws) to talk about?

revisiting the argument for small schools

In the Washington Post, Lonnae O’Neal Parker has written a fine series about Jonathan Lewis, a young man who graduated last year from Washington’s Coolidge High School–barely, years late, after scraping through the required courses. He is smart and he has supportive parents, but he rarely attended class or completed assignments, and he aimed for D’s.

Jonathan walks toward the cafeteria doors. A question follows him: If you want to make your mother proud, if you know you can do the work, if you swear to everybody you see that you want to graduate, why don’t you go to class?

Jonathan stares silently for a few moments.

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I really don’t know.”

With due humility about my ignorance of Jonathan’s situation, I’d propose an answer. The whole structure of a school like Coolidge is inappropriate for his social and economic context. It’s a huge high school, with numerous classes and cliques of students and corridors longer than football fields (as Parker observed). The onus is really on individuals to get to class and to concentrate. That is very difficult if most of the other students are not focused; there are too many distractions and temptations, too little order.

So why do large high schools work in other contexts, such as affluent suburbs? And why did Coolidge itself work better when Jonathan’s mother attended it, 30 years ago? Because there used to be a social contract in which working class people had dignified and stable jobs. Their children could also obtain those jobs without college diplomas–sometimes without even graduating from high school. Because most adults had working-class jobs, there was a general atmosphere of order and respect for authority in the community. It was easy for kids to envision concretely the benefits they would obtain from completing school. There was crime and academic failure, but it was marginal, not prominent.

We have a social contract today, and it is not without merit. If you obtain skills for the business and professional world and credentials to demonstrate those skills, you have wide opportunities. Sex, skin color, and age are less profound obstacles than they once were. But it’s a long way from Coolidge High School to the professional world; the curriculum is much to easy to prepare students for college, and there are few role models in the community. Thus it’s pretty much unrealistic that most teenagers will be self-disciplined enough to delay gratification and get themselves through a school like Coolidge. Even if they do, the benefits will be hard to see.

That’s why, despite mixed evaluation studies, I remain interested in the new small high schools that provide one coherent, specialized curriculum for all their students. In a small high school that was focused on media, or engineering, or cooking, Jonathan wouldn’t have to choose between the halls and a classroom. There would basically be no halls. The school would be an organized work environment with limited numbers of teachers and students who all knew one another and had tasks to accomplish together. The gap between this place and the professional work world would be much smaller.

a new self-consciousness in art

Traditionally, artists work within a style, but they don’t think of themselves that way. They either equate their style with art itself (believing that they depict nature as it always has been depicted), or else they offer abstract and universal reasons for their stylistic choices. For example, classical styles were often defended on the ground that the ancient Greeks had discovered universal principles of beauty and representation.

Then, at a certain point, it became obvious that all art depicts the world through a style, that styles differ from time to time and place to place, and there is no independent aesthetic standard that makes one better than all the others.

Since then, to make a picture has been an entirely different matter. You must start by picking a style. The most obvious move is to use someone else’s style, which is why revivalism became the major mode in the early nineteenth century, the age of Gothic revival and the troubadour style; of Greek revival; and of orientalism. There have been various efforts to avoid style altogether–abstraction, minimalism, surrealism–but they have all quickly become styles of their own.

I have been convinced of this Hegelian story for more than twenty years, and I have seen a lot of images in that time. I’m always looking for the moment when full stylistic self-consciousness begins. As of our last trip to Paris, I’m pushing the onset back a few decades. The Musée Jacquemart-André owns a fresco that Tiepolo painted in the mid-1750s to depict the arrival of King Henri III (of France) at the Villa Contarini, near Venice, in 1574. (Click for a large image). Tiepolo chose to paint this image in the style of Veronese. He didn’t copy an actual Veronese–something that might have been done centuries before. Instead, he painted the scene as Veronese would have seen and shown it. I don’t think that choice would have occurred to any artist before 1750, and once it happened, art was on its way to modernism.

on spin, partisanship, conflict, and other bad words

We say, on the basis of our national focus-group report, that college students in the United States are hungry for political conversations that are authentic, involve diverse views and are free of manipulation and ‘spin.'” That finding can provoke a skeptical response, as follows: Young people say they don’t like the national political debate, but they have naive and unrealistic standards. The standard tactics of communication (such as negative political ads) work with young people; thus we should discount their distaste for political rhetoric.

I’d like to break this issue into parts. What are young people against?

1. Partisanship: Almost half of our sample said they were Independents. I recall none who spoke up for the value of parties. A Princeton student explains, “I’m trying to figure out what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s ethically acceptable, and pulling my views from so many different places, it’s hard to put myself into one particular party.” I’d say: This response is understandable, especially given how badly our actual parties behave. However, parties play an essential role; it is good for them to compete; and we need people to devote care and attention to the party of their choice, albeit not at the expense of the common good.

2. Conflict: No one likes it, but it’s inevitable. Suppressing it can be dangerous. Our sample actually agreed with this. About one quarter said, “the political system is filled with unnecessary conflict,” but 39 percent said, “there are so many competing groups in politics that conflict is unavoidable.”

3. Negativity: The students don’t like negative campaigning, but negative campaigning works. What to make of that? One answer is that some harshly critical discourse is valuable, yet the overall balance (in both the paid and unpaid media) is too critical–yet there’s not much we can do about that, except to build good news organs that strive for an appropriate balance.

4. Spin and manipulation: Here’s where I think the kids are saying something novel and important. They are the objects of unprecedented efforts to persuade them–powerful entities hire professionals to get them to buy stuff, to vote, to believe one side or another. These efforts are extremely sophisticated and often effective. But there is a brewing backlash against the whole idea of sophisticated mass persuasion. Most individuals see no alternative except to tune out completely. Still, there is an appetite for genuinely open-ended, diverse conversations in which most participants don’t have a predetermined agenda.